Writing about the institutional decline of theory at the end of the twentieth century, Nicholas Dames (2012: 163–64) observes that theory, once seen as “the key to all the world’s things,” gradually became “just another thing-in-the-world.” The reverse, I think, could be said of genre in the twenty-first century. Once easily dismissed as flat, repetitive, and prosaic—the enemy of the literary—genre has today emerged as an indispensable concept for both contemporary literary study and the study of contemporary literature. Although journals devoted to work on genre have been around since the late 1960s, scholarly treatments of the topic have exploded in the twenty-first century. A cursory glance at the MLA International Bibliography reveals as much: peer-reviewed publications with “genre” in their title increased significantly from the 1980s (398) to the 1990s (651), but then nearly doubled in the 2000s (1263). The 2010s have kept pace, with more than 1000...

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